Hey everyone,

I’ve been making games for about 3-4 years now with GameMaker Studio (version 2 how recently come out 😀 ) and one of my projects for IT at school was to make a game. My teacher was very impressed with the quality of my game and told me that I could probably make indie games in my spare time and make some money off them. I’ve been thinking hard about this for a few hours and I thought I’d ask a community of indie game developers what their thoughts are on the best approach.

After thinking for a while I think the best approach for me would be to use patreon and having a “pay $x every month” system. I know it’s not the conventional way of doing it, I know that when most people start a gamedev project they set up a one-time campaign, advertise and hope they get all the money they need to mae the game. But I want to take a different approach.

What I was going to do is make a $5 or $10 per month subscription and for that price you get behind the scenes videos of my journey designing and developing the game, your name in the credits, closed beta access to the game, access to a closed facebook group where I can directly interact with my patrons and probably more and then release the game free and open source for people to play and learn from.

One of my friends was saying “why would anyone pay money and end up playing a free game?”, my response is that the money they’re paying isn’t for the game, it’s for behind the scenes videos which can act as tutorials and/or a blog on the process I would take to produce a ‘professional’ grade game (since it’s a free game and only made by one person don’t expect Call of Duty quality) and being able to beta test and directly interact with me to be able to give input and feedback on the game.

I could make the games paid and polish up the game a little more but I like the idea of being able to make my games open source and giving back to the community.

What do you think of my idea?

I’m from Melbourne, Australia, and was wondering if there’s others down here that are going to compete in Ludum Dare. I’m not specifically asking to join a team because I want to take a crack at it by myself, I struggle with graphics and music so those are a couple things I wish to improve this Ludum Dare, but I’d find it more fun if I was hanging out with someone else who was working on their own project so that we could discuss ideas a bit and help playtest each other’s games. Otherwise I’d be sitting in my room alone which I’d still enjoy but I think it would be cooler to have others around.

I’m not attempting to organise some massive meetup and hire out an entire venue, I’d be happy just to get a few people together and hang out at maccas working on our Ludum Dare games. If you live in Melbourne and are up for this put a comment down in the description and we’ll start working it out

Hey Everyone,

I’ve been using GameMaker Studio for quite a few years now, I’m very comfortable and familiar with it but lately I’ve been running in to some issues. Their newest engine (Game Maker Studio 2) still has a few bugs and I’ve had to rewrite the same game 3 times now because every time I do it I run in to a new bug that corrupts my game. I’ve already bought the HTML5 license for it and am definitely not going to ditch it altogether, I really enjoy Game Maker Studio and will want to use it in the future… just after they’ve fixed it.

For the past couple days I’ve been casually looking around at other engines, I’ve been using game engines all my gamedev life so naturally that’s what I gravitated to. But lately I’ve been watching a lot of the coding challenges from The Coding Train on YouTube where they solely use JavaScript to make their games. It looked pretty cool, writing all the code from scratch and what better way to create web games is to directly use JavaScript? Because I’m not doing it through an engine sure it’s going to be a little more difficult but in the end I feel like it would give better results because I can specifically optimize it for the web.

I’ve already googled for what are the best JavaScript frameworks for creating web-based games but I’m seeing mixed results and thought I’d come directly to the gamedev community. All I really need is a framework that can easily handle things like collision, mouse clicks, animations and all other necessary game functions.

Thanks, DatCodingGuy